


Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

by rosa_himmelblau



Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 11:15:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20045074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: So this is what purgatory looks like.





	Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

The basement was cavernous, lit by only a couple of light bulbs that hung from the ceiling. Frank put down his bucket and walked around, looking at the walls, at the tangle of pipes and valves. “I am in hell,” he said for the fifth, or maybe the twentieth time. He kept saying it because he couldn’t help himself, even though he knew how pointless it was. Nobody was listening anyway, not even God.

Especially not God.

If there was anything in the world that convinced Frank that there **was** no God, it was this, it was ending up this freezing, wet, messy basement in purgatory. Except it wasn’t really purgatory, it was hell. Frank knew that surer than he’d ever known anything in his life.

“And not hell in a metaphorical sense,” Frank said to himself. “I’m talking about actual, literal, eternal-damnation hell.”

“It’s not hell! Will you quit saying that?”

“Shut. Up.” Frank snapped.

He knew it was hell because purgatory might be nothing but spending eternity in some wet basement, bailing water into a sink that kept clogging up until that non-existent God decided you’d bailed enough, you’d learned your lesson, you’d— Frank didn’t know what, Frank didn’t care what, Frank wanted to take his bucket and throw it across the room. Purgatory might be a wet basement, but hell was a wet basement with Sonny Steelgrave in it.

“Quit talking to me,” Steelgrave said.

“I’m not talking to you!” Frank hollered. “I’m talking to myself!”

“Well, quit talking to yourself out loud! You’re not the only one here, you know!”

“Yeah, I do know, and that’s how I know this is hell!”

A bucket of water hit him in the back of the neck—just the water, not the bucket itself, anyway, but Frank still felt rage boiling up inside him. He spun around, as best he could in the almost ankle-deep water.

"Purgatory!" Steelgrave yelled at him. "It's purgatory, you dumb fed!" He was wearing one of those thousand dollar suits, which was a stupid way to be dressed for bailing water. Of course, Frank was wearing a suit too, but it wasn't an expensive one. Apparently there was a dress code for bailing water in purgatory. If there was a God, Frank didn't even want to meet Him because clearly He was insane. Frank kept thinking of taking off his jacket, but then the idea seemed to slip his mind and he'd realize he still had it on.

"Suicides don't go to purgatory," Frank said, using the biggest weapon he had on hand. He'd like to have strangled Steelgrave, but with both of them being dead, that seemed pointless.

Steelgrave looked affronted, but he didn't respond. "This is purgatory," he said again, "And you don't get to leave 'til you figure out why you're here."

"Oh, yeah? And why are you here?"

"A clerical error," Steelgrave said as though he was completely stupid.

Frank rolled his eyes. The slowly rising water was lapping at his ankles, and somewhere in the distance, he thought he heard a pounding. "Are we on a ship?"

"No, of course not. We're in the basement of an office building."

"Where is all this water coming from?" Frank hated to ask him questions, but there wasn't anybody else there, and he needed to know what was going on.

But Steelgrave just shrugged. He was filling a bucket with water, and when it was filled, he'd take it over to the big industrial sink in the corner and pour it out. Frank watched him do this, and noticed something Steelgrave seemed to have missed: there was a hole in the drain, and most of the water was escaping through it.

"Purgatory is being Sisyphus," Frank said.

Steelgrave looked at him sharply. "Who the hell are you calling a sissy?" he demanded, which made Frank laugh, which didn't improve Steelgrave's mood, and he threw the empty bucket at Frank. And he missed.

"Sisyphus was a Greek myth, about a guy who—"

"Will you just shut up? What the fuck do I care about some myth?"

Frank went to say something and stopped. He needed to keep his temper, for a couple of reasons. The first was that if this **was** purgatory, he was pretty sure his temper was one of the reasons he was here. The second reason was probably going to keep him there even longer because the second reason was spite. Spite wasn’t a deadly sin, at least as far as Frank could recall, but it certainly was a sin. Frank couldn’t even remember if the Catholic Church cared one way or the other about the deadliness of sins. He only remembered that there were venal and mortal sins, and mortal sins would send you to hell, and apparently he hadn’t committed any. Or he had, and the Church had been wrong all these years. That was certainly possible.

After all, if Steelgrave was in purgatory, somebody had screwed up somewhere, because one thing he was sure of was that suicides went straight to hell.

Of course, keeping his temper simply to spite Steelgrave probably wasn't going to get him out of this basement any faster.

"This doesn't make any sense," Frank said. Water was dripping down on his head, so he moved, only it didn't help. "Where is all of it coming from? And what's the point—"

"Does it look like I know anything about this place?” Steelgrave asked. “If you want answers, talk to God!"

"I don't believe in God," Frank muttered.

Steelgrave gave him a bewildered look. "That's really stupid. How can you be in purgatory—or hell—if there's no God?"

"I am not discussing theology with a—" Frank nearly said something nasty, then stopped himself. He was keeping his temper, the better to irritate Steelgrave. "—with you." He hadn't been bailing enough, and the water was rising faster, sloshing towards his knees, and he was freezing. He kept looking at the pipes, trying to find what was leaking, but that didn't seem to be where the water was coming from. It seemed to be seeping down the walls. "And I don't want to believe in a God that would trap me on a sinking boat with you as some kind of punishment."

Steelgrave muttered something about how obviously he was the one being punished. "You aren't even bailing!"

Frank's sense of justice had to give him that one. Unlike Sisyphus, they didn't just end up at status quo if they didn't bail; the situation got worse. Frank wondered if they could drown. He'd been half-drowned twice in his life, once when he was nine and his father had tried to teach him to swim, and once later, at the hands of some thugs hired by Sid Royce. But the point of drowning was dying, and if he was already dead—

Steelgrave splashed more water at him. "Make yourself useful!" he yelled. He didn't like the rising water any more than Frank did, and he didn't like Frank any more than Frank liked him.

"If it gets too high, we can always climb into the sink," Frank said. It was the only other thing in the room.

"I'm not hiding in a sink!"

Frank hadn't exactly meant hide, he'd meant just to get up further than the water, but if the water kept rising, that solution wouldn't last long anyway.

Steelgrave was saying something under his breath that Frank couldn't quite get, then he did get it, he recognized the familiar words and nearly smiled.

"—now and at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace—"

Frank had really not been expecting prayer, not from Sonny Steelgrave. Of course, he hadn't been expecting Steelgrave at all, or unexplained rising water, or purgatory or hell, or even—how had he died? Frank had no idea. That was even more unfair than all the rest of it.

Frank picked up his bucket and scooped up more water, poured it into the sink. Steelgrave did the same. They kept at it for several minutes, maybe making progress. Frank could see his shoes, anyway.

Then the one of the bulbs began to flicker, and then it went out.

“Jesus Christ! I'm not bailing water in the dark!” Steelgrave shouted. He put his bucket down upside-down and climbed on top of it, reaching up to jiggle the light bulb.

Frank’s head swam—an appropriate action, considering everything—and he got a little dizzy. Without thinking, he shoved Steelgrave off the bucket, away from the bulb and into the water. “Are you out of your mind? Are you trying to electrocute yourself *again*? I thought you were supposed to be learning something—”

Steelgrave got up and shoved him back, and then they were having a shoving match, and Steelgrave knocked him down into the water.

Frank scrambled back up and went after Steelgrave, but Steelgrave had him by the shoulders and was about to push him back into the water when a voice stopped him, even though the voice was talking to Frank.

“Frank. Frank. Frank, c’m’on, what's the matter with you? You’re getting all wet.”

It was the voice of God, of course.

“Of course I’m getting all wet! You stuck me in a freezing, wet basement!”

That’s when God started laughing at him, and when Frank woke up.

He was sitting in a chair behind Uncle Mike’s cabin, and he’d fallen asleep there. It must have been that, when the rain started, it was so light that instead of waking him, his unconscious incorporated it into his dream, but now it was pouring, and Vince was trying to get him to come inside. Frank didn’t argue, he just got up and ran into the cabin.

So. He wasn’t dead, he wasn't stuck in a basement purgatory with Sonny Steelgrave, and perhaps most importantly, Vince wasn’t God.

“Jeez, Francis, I go get some groceries and come home to find you're not smart enough to come in outta a thunderstorm? What's the matter with you?"

"I was asleep," Frank said, grabbing up a towel to dry himself off.

"No kidding. What were you dreaming about?” Vince asked.

“I was bailing out a basement with leaky pipes.” Frank wasn’t going to tell him the whole thing.

“And this was my fault?” Vince asked.

“Yeah, it was your fault,” Frank said, refusing to add that Vince was God, because not even in his dreams was Vince God, no-how, no-way.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this after my kitchen flooded.


End file.
